Chapter 3

Poetics

Poetic dictionâ•… 46
Blank verseâ•… 49
Sonnetsâ•… 52
Odes, elegies, epitaphsâ•… 55
Silent poetryâ•… 60

Wordsworth thought a lot about how and why he wrote poetry. These ideas, or
his poetics, centre on the notion that our entire experience and perception of
the world is shaped through the medium of words, little units of meaning that
have the power to modify and change the way we see and understand. Words
take on even more significance for him when located within a poem:€they are
transfigured by different kinds of form, metre and rhythm that recast their
meaning through sounds and patterns. He spent considerable time selecting
each word that appears in his poetry, claiming to compose his verse and prose
with the ‘slow and laborious hand’ of the memorial mason (PW, II.60). Words,
Wordsworth stated, are ‘too awful an instrument for good and evil to be tri-
fled with’, ‘an incarnation’ of our thoughts serving to give them meaning and
vitality. Once language is used ‘only as a clothing’ for meaning, he argued, it
becomes a ‘counter-spirit’ to understanding, dissolving our experience of life
into abstraction (PW, II.85).
Wordsworth was concerned that his eighteenth-century predecessors, as
well as many of his peers, had become locked into a dead and spiritless poetic
language, employing only ‘mechanical’ and artificial words to write about ‘feel-
ings and ideas with which they had no natural connection whatsoever’ (PW,
I.131, 160). Their poetry seemed to him excessively stylized and fake, articu-
lating ideas that were flamboyant or entertaining rather than authentic and
real. Confronted by the ‘distorted language’ this poetry used, he argued, read-
ers are cast into a ‘perturbed and unusual state of mind’. This in turn blocks
them from the experience of ‘pleasure’ that poetry ought to produce:€a con-
dition of being or mindfulness that is at once composed and animated (PW,
I.160). In reaction against the elevated diction of eighteenth-century poetry,

44
 Poetics 45

then, Wordsworth sought to metrically arrange ‘the real language of men in a

state of vivid sensation’ in order to summon the actual everyday thoughts and
feelings human beings experience (PW, I.118).
The following discussion explores Wordsworth’s use of ‘real language’ to
suggest that his choice of words€– his poetic diction€– offers us a portal on to
what he considered the purpose of poetry:€to enable readers to experience a
‘powerful feeling’ that grants insight into and a compassionate engagement
with one’s community and environment. By gripping, even shocking, the
reader with his depictions of strange rustic scenes and people, he invites us
to think about the way we hear, see and feel these images and then reflect on
the particular interpretive biases, interests and methodologies of that reading
experience. As Wordsworth argued, ‘descriptions, either of passions, manners,
or characters’ are ‘read a hundred times’ in verse, where ‘prose is read once’,
poetry encouraging repeated readings that magnify the emotional experience
presented (PW, I.150).
We also tend to read poetry more than once so that we can explore the way it
plays with rhythms and sounds, an aspect of poetics called prosody. Wordsworth
suggests that poetry conveys our experience of life in even more vivid and ani-
mating terms than prose because the poetic arrangement of words into various
forms, rhythms and metres creates an extra layer of meaning. Metre can both
regulate the poetic voice by managing the ‘spontaneous overflow of feelings’
poetry evokes in the reader (PW, I.126); but it can also destabilize this voice,
offering up oblique and implied meanings variously dependent on speech pat-
terns, accents and dialects. The rhythm of a poem not only differs from reader
to reader, but also changes as the individual reads and rereads it, sometimes
stressing one word sometimes another, and so exemplifying Wordsworth’s
understanding of poetry as a site of interplay between meanings, rhythms and
language. This is why Wordsworth’s poetry is understood to signify through the
reader’s emotional response to it, ‘the feeling therein developed’ giving ‘impor-
tance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling’
(PW, I.128). It is the feeling we are left with after reading one of Wordsworth’s
poems that helps us to interpret what we have read by guiding us back to those
particular words and phrases that we most remember.
This chapter first explores the kinds of words and metres Wordsworth con-
siders most effective in evoking our feelings; and second, outlines the poetic
forms he most commonly employs:€blank verse, the sonnet, the ode, elegy and
epitaph. Readers unfamiliar with prosodic debates should bear in mind that
however committed Wordsworth was to metrical rule, he always advocated
the ‘spirit of the versification’ over the ‘letter of the metre’, encouraging us to
think and feel ‘the music of the poem’ for ourselves (PW, III.29–30). His most
46 The Cambridge Introduction to William Wordsworth

famous collection, the Lyrical Ballads, is itself made up of a hybrid form, com-
prised of the first-person lyric (a traditionally non-narrative form associated
with the direct expression of emotions) and the ballad (a strongly narrative
form marked by repeated rhymes to keep the story moving). This willingness
to experiment with poetry suggests that Wordsworth is invested in imagi�
natively playing with form, and encouraged his reader to do the same. As he
declared in the ‘Preface’ (1802) to this collection:€‘I have one request to make
of my Reader, which is, that in judging these Poems he would decide by his
own feelings genuinely, and not by reflection upon what will probably be the
judgment of others’ (PW, I.155).

Poetic diction

For Wordsworth, poetic diction comprises two elements:€language (the words

he uses to write poems) and metre (the rhythms and sound patterns he creates
by using words in particular ways). In the ‘Advertisement’ (1798) and expanded
‘Preface’ (1800; 1802) to the Lyrical Ballads, he argues that his main concern
is to mould everyday language into metrical forms, that is, to versify ‘human
passions, human characters, and human incidents’ in the ‘real language of
men’ (PW, I.116). Readers disagree on how unique this project was:€the critic
Marilyn Butler, for example, suggests that Wordsworth’s poetic experiments
were already current in popular eighteenth-century magazine poetry and so
are relatively unexceptional.1 The Romantic writer William Hazlitt, however,
argued that the Lyrical Ballads were both politically challenging and more dif-
ficult than popular verse. He claimed that while the ‘trifling’ subject matter of
the poems might not have been unusual, the ‘profound’ and weighty ‘reflec-
tions’ they provoked offered intellectual and emotional acuity into the nature
of the self, consciousness and the imagination.2
Wordsworth’s key innovation, however, was that he sought to lay bare the
ideological underpinnings of both the words commonly chosen to describe
‘incidents and situations from common life’, and also the way readers respond
to them (PW, I.123). The rustic and uncultured feel of the Lyrical Ballads, for
example, derives not from long descriptions of rural life, but instead from the
use of simple repeated words and phrases that capture the recurring routines,
as well as harsh conditions, that characterize lower-class life and labour. The
poet knows that his middle-class readers are accustomed to complacently, if
sentimentally, reacting to the ballad form:€these readers assume that the cor-
rect response to a lyrical ballad such as ‘Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman’ (1798),
for example, is one of pity, compassion and kindness coupled with a desire to
 Poetics 47

resolve or fix his situation. The undecorated language and metre �Wordsworth
uses to depict the displaced, aged and sick Simon Lee in fact challenges these
readers to reflect on their understanding of the poem. By presenting Lee’s story
so starkly, Wordsworth overturns easy and predictable hypotheses about the
labouring classes and forces readers to question the agenda behind their emo-
tional response and the political conditions that have given rise to the poem’s
scenario.
Wordsworth’s insistence that the reader morally respond to his work, how-
ever, can prove disquieting. His correspondence with a young admirer called
John Wilson underlines this, one in which they discuss the lyrical ballad ‘The
Idiot Boy’ (1798), in which a mentally ill child is sent to fetch a doctor for a
sick neighbour. When the child gets lost, his mother goes in search of him, as
does the neighbour whose concern for her friend’s son has distracted her from
her illness. Wilson told Wordsworth that he had felt considerable distress after
reading the poem. The poet replied that this was exactly the reaction he had
wanted, the poem written to induce discomfort and urge readers to face up to
their ‘disgusted’ reactions to the ‘unsightly and unsmooth’ aspects of existence.
The poet declares that he deliberately used the word ‘idiot’ (rather than more
humorous terms like ‘lack-wit, half-wit, witless, etc.’) to realize this edgy read-
ing experience. For Wordsworth, it isn’t enough for a poet to describe feelings
his readers would ‘sympathise with’:€the poet should also write about uncom-
fortable scenarios, which his readers would be ‘better and more moral beings
if they did sympathise with’.3
His poems attempt to achieve this by first, emotionally arresting the reader
by using a raw and ‘naked’ language and form; second, drawing attention to
the ideological motivations of our emotional reaction; and third, encouraging
us to reflect on this reaction within the hypnotic sound of the poem’s rhythms.
In ‘The Idiot Boy’, we are riveted and unsettled by the story, but simultaÂ�neously
introduced to ‘new compositions of feeling’ in the poem that evoke the daily
experiences of people unable to ignore the rawer elements of life because they
cannot afford to do so (Betty Foy is financially, as well as emotionally, pre-
vented from shutting her son away in an asylum). Rural community is thus
held together by what the poet perceived to be a ‘strength, disinterestedness,
and grandeur of love’ that he attempts to invoke in his poetry to neutralize,
or flood ‘like a deluge’, the ‘feeble sensation of disgust and aversion’ men like
�Wilson might initially feel on reading the poem.
Wordsworth sought to find a language that granted pleasure to his reader,
then, not by superficially delighting them, but by stimulating feelings of com-
passion and duty. His poems, he wrote, each have ‘a worthy purpose’ (PW,
I.124). He related ‘incidents and situations from common life’ in ‘an unusual
48 The Cambridge Introduction to William Wordsworth

way’ to counter ‘urbanite affectations of eighteenth-century poesy’, cheap

‘frantic novels’ and ‘extravagant stories in verse’:€all of these genres, he thought,
corroded readers’ capacity to meditate on the ‘repeated experience and regular
feelings’ of the lower classes (PW, I.123, 128, 124). Such meditation was impor-
tant because it encouraged readers to reflect on ‘the essential passions of the
heart’ (PW, I.124) in a process that made them think and feel about real, rather
than abstract, situations. ‘The Idiot Boy’ and a further lyrical ballad called ‘The
Mad Mother’ (1798), for example, do not seek to define a generalized notion
of ‘maternal passion’, but instead provoke the reader into experiencing the par-
ticular maternal struggles both poems embody (PW, I.126).
One accusation sometimes levelled at Wordsworth’s intentionally sympathy-
inducing style, however, is that it might fabricate feeling, rather than genuinely
invoke it. The poet attempted to remedy this tension by highlighting metre
as that which constantly overturns and so renews our emotional response as
we go along. Verse, from the Latin versus or ‘turning’, is suggestive of the way
Wordsworth turns or transforms what he sees into words and then into expe-
riences and feelings, an argument he outlines in his 1802 revision of the 1800
‘Preface’ to the Lyrical Ballads. In the 1802 ‘Preface’, Wordsworth maintains
that metre enables readers to confront painful topics in a way prose does not,
divesting language ‘of its reality’ by throwing ‘a sort of half consciousness of
unsubstantial existence over the whole composition’ (PW, I.147). Metre tem-
porarily de-realizes the world to make the reader work to bring it back into
focus and discover its ‘truth’€– not a truth that explains or fixes what is really
going on in the poem€– but one that gives us access to a sense of what the poem
means in the moment in which we read it. This truth has nothing to do with
‘external testimony’, Wordsworth writes, but is instead ‘carried alive into the
heart by passion’, made real through the reader’s feeling (PW, I.139). This kind
of reading experience allows us to see imaginatively, finding meaning in all
aspects of life, especially those that seem trivial or inconsequential.
Strict metres in particular enable this reading experience because they
impress repeated thoughts and feelings into our bodies and memories.
Dorothy, for example, experienced a strong feeling of solace by reciting over
and over two lines from Wordsworth’s poem ‘The Solitary Reaper’:€‘O listen!
for the Vale profound / Is overflowing with the sound’ (7–8). She described
this feeling as ‘inexpressibly soothing’, repeating the lines to herself ‘in dis-
connection with any thought’ simply to call up their gentle sound.4 The Vic-
torian aesthete Walter Pater also argued that Wordsworth’s ability to fuse
compelling but simple words with metre created a ‘rhythmical power’ with
the capacity to act as a kind of ‘sedative’ that at once arouses and regulates
our emotional response to the poem.5 As Wordsworth argued, the ‘regular
 Poetics 49

and uniform’ presence of metre in poetry has ‘great efficacy in tempering

and restraining the passion by an intertexture of ordinary feeling’, the read-
er’s excited feelings checked by underlying, habitual ones (PW, I.146). The
reader hears ‘real’ language, then, but it is ‘fitted’ by metrical arrangement
into the poem’s frame in a process that ‘divest[s]’ this language of its real-
ity to make it temporarily strange and so give us new insights into our own
readings (PW, I.139, 147).
In the lyrical ballad ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’ (1798), for example, we
are presented with a scene of common life communicated by the familiar beat
of the ballad metre. Yet the fact this stable metre carries along an almost super-
natural story about a landowner’s metamorphosis from a ‘lusty drover’ into
a freezing and skeletal spectre also unsettles us. Wordsworth’s point is that
from the ordinary and everyday spring the most shocking and impassioned
moments, and we can only make sense of them by thinking carefully through
them in a state of ‘tranquillity’ (PW, I.149). The task of the poet is to teach us
how to recollect emotion in tranquillity as a figure with an unusual capac�
ity to conjure ‘up in himself passions’ and ‘a greater readiness and power in
expressing what he thinks and feels’ (PW, I.138). The poet is not superior to
others (Wordsworth rejects the role of transcendent seer in the ‘Preface’), but
‘thinks and feels in the spirit of the passions of men’ in a more pronounced
manner in order to offer an example of the feeling individual. The poet is freed
to acknowledge the ‘beauty of the universe’ because he truly respects what
he sees, committed as he is to looking ‘at the world in the spirit of love’ (PW,
I.142, 140). Later Romantic poets may have approved Percy Bysshe Shelley’s
idea that the poet is a ‘nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its
own solitude’; but for Wordsworth, the poet is someone able to sing ‘a song in
which all human beings join with him’ (PW, I.141).6

Blank verse

Wordsworth is perhaps most well known for his use of blank verse, signifi�
cantly in The Prelude. Many readers overlook his commitment to this form,
however, partly because critics treat his blank verse as if it spon�taneously
poured from him as he wandered through the countryside. Dorothy’s
Â�Grasmere Journals, however, suggest that Wordsworth’s habits of composition
involved a close interplay between walking in the natural world, conversing
with others and physical acts of writing. As she recalls:€‘After William rose
we went & sate in the orchard till dinner time. We walked a long time in the
Evening upon our favourite path€– the owls hooted, the night-hawk sang to
50 The Cambridge Introduction to William Wordsworth

itself ’ and ‘I left Â�William writing a few lines about the night-hawk and other
images of the evening, & went to seek for letters€ – none were come.€ – We
walked backwards & forwards a little, after I returned to William.’7
Dorothy highlights the communal and contemplative aspect of Words-
worth’s writing process here, suggesting its intimate connection to his walking
habits. We hear a similar idea related by one of the gardeners at Rydal Mount,
who vividly remembered Wordsworth’s routine of composing, writing and
walking:

he would set his heäd a bit forrad, and put his hands behint his back.
And then he would start bumming, and it was bum, bum, bum, stop;
then bum, bum, bum, reet down till t’other end, and then he’d set down
and git a bit o’ paper out and write a bit; and then he git up, and bum,
bum, bum, and goa on bumming for long enough right down and back
agean.8

This account of Wordsworth’s writing process suggests that it was a gradual

and laboured one:€ the poet regularly suffered from headaches, exhaustion,
chest, bowel and eye complaints before and during periods of intense com-
position. Yet the gardener’s reminiscence also hints at the manner in which
Wordsworth felt his way into blank verse metre, the ‘bum, bum, bum’ of his
walk recalling the de-dum, de-dum, de-dum rhythm of blank-verse iambic
pentameter. Certainly blank verse was far from spontaneous or effortless for
Wordsworth€– he described it as ‘infinitely the most difficult metre to man-
age’€– but he succeeds in it by embodying the rhythm (in his walking) and then
transcribing it through language as poetry.9
Wordsworth was drawn to blank verse for two significant, and connected,
reasons:€first, it was regarded as a politically radical form; and second, it was
associated with John Milton. Blank verse connoted reformism because its
metre granted the poet rhythmic space to play with words, liberating him or
her from what Milton called ‘the modern bondage of rhyming’.10 The poet was
still expected to employ the five-beat iambic pentameter line, but blank verse
nevertheless allowed for hypermetrical lines (where a line contains more than
ten syllables and so ‘goes over’ five beats). The formalist critic Simon Jarvis
points out that Wordsworth often writes hypermetrically when he loses control
over language because of some emotional or intellectual ‘pressure’ that causes
him to blurt out phrases or words that unsettle the metre.11 The steady iambic
pentameter of ‘There was a Boy’ (1798), for example, is disturbed instantly by
a series of caesural or ‘medial’ pauses in the first two lines that alert readers
to the troubled content of the poem:€‘There was a Boy, ye knew him well, ye
Cliffs / And Islands of Winander!’ (1–2). The commas and exclamation mark
 Poetics 51

break up the rhythm here to allow readers to shift their emotional state in
Â�accordance with the poem’s elegiac tone.
For Wordsworth, then, blank verse offered a steady rhythm inside which
he could experiment with metre, pauses and the emotional response of his
Â�readers. While Coleridge suggested that blank verse was ‘metre to the eye only’,
Wordsworth argued that it actually slowed down the reading process, inviting
readers to stress the final syllables of each line and then pause, so bringing out
the ‘passion’ of the poem’s subject and sound alike.12 Wordsworth thus used the
form in poems that normally would have been written as ballads or lyrics. He
started his poem ‘Michael’, for example, as a pastoral ballad, a form tradition-
ally suited to its narrative about the demise of a shepherd and his family after
they lose their inherited land due to enclosure. Yet after living with the poem’s
narrative for a while, Wordsworth decided that the shepherd’s tale deserved to
be voiced through the contemplative and unhurried measures of blank verse.
This change of mind deeply upset some readers:€the politician Charles James
Fox even claimed that stories about shepherds did not warrant the same met-
rical form as great poems like Paradise Lost. Wordsworth, by contrast, claimed
that the depth of feeling and passion inherent in everyday rural life gave it pre-
cisely the same claim to blank verse as Milton’s famous epic poem.
Wordsworth consequently wrote a lot of blank verse, composing over 5,000
lines of it between 1796 and 1800, including early drafts of The Prelude, The Bor-
derers and ‘The Ruined Cottage’. He commonly uses the standard decasyllabic
line (a line with ten syllables) in his blank verse, but then deliberately breaks
the pattern if the regularity of the beat threatens to overwhelm the emotional
content of the poem. In ‘The Brothers’, for example, Wordsworth frequently
adds unstressed ‘extra’ syllables to the ends of lines to make the poem sound
more conversational (‘Poor Walter! whether it was care that spurred him’, 214).
In the more reflective ‘Tintern Abbey’, however, Wordsworth tends to stress
the third, usually offbeat syllable, to disrupt the metre and slow it down. This
effect is exemplified by the emphasis on ‘sad’ in ‘The still, sad music of human-
ity’ (92). This line illustrates one of Wordsworth’s frequent blank-verse tech-
niques:€he begins by using an unhurried pace (‘The still, sad’) but then closes
the line with a speedy ending (‘music of humanity’). He also uses another
trademark technique in ‘Tintern Abbey’ called syntactic inversion, meaning
reversed word orders (‘Therefore am I still / A lover of the meadows’, 103–4);
and enjambment, sentences that continue over two or more lines (‘I cannot
paint / What then I was’, 75–6). In contrast to the syntactically contained lines
of ‘Michael’, the run-on lines of ‘Tintern Abbey’ are suggestive of a mind in
deep thought, unable to compartmentalize the complexities being pondered,
but rescued from its cognitive maze by the invisible force of line endings.13
52 The Cambridge Introduction to William Wordsworth

If ‘Tintern Abbey’ is steeped in a blank verse of enjambment and mid-line

pauses to convey the meditative emotions of the narrator, ‘A Night-Piece’
(1798) uses an impulsive and fluctuating metre to depict a more startled and
disturbed set of feelings. The poem€– which Wordsworth considered his best
example of blank verse€– captures the sensation of astonishment the narrator
sustains on encountering the sudden illumination of the sky by the moon and
stars as they appear from behind an obscuring cloud. Readers are invited into
the narrator’s vision and consequent awe as ‘the clouds are split / Asunder,€–
and above his head he sees / The clear Moon, and the glory of the heavens’ by
a string of offbeats and double offbeats, starker still against the neutral and
regular metre at the poem’s beginning and close. Employing volatile and regu-
lar metres in the same poem allows Wordsworth to present overwhelming,
painful or frightening experiences even as he offers readers a way to think
about them through steady reflection.

Sonnets

Wordsworth’s use of blank verse to invoke reflection is taken in part from his
reading of Milton’s verse, of which he knew hundreds of lines by heart. The
poet makes countless, and often unconscious, metrical allusions to Paradise
Lost in The Prelude, but he was also deeply affected by Milton’s sonnets. He told
his friend Isabella Fenwick that his particular awakening to them occurred ‘in
the cottage of Town-End, one afternoon, in 1801’, whereupon ‘my Sister read
to me the Sonnets of Milton. I had long been well acquainted with them, but
I was particularly struck on that occasion with the dignified simplicity and
majestic harmony that runs through most of them€– in character so totally
different from the Italian, and still more so from Shakespeare’s fine Sonnets’.14
Milton’s sonnets were generally recognized as ‘the great model and arche-
type’ of the form by the nineteenth century, and Wordsworth was eager to imi-
tate their style. As a reviewer in The Gentleman’s Magazine (1841) declared:€‘We
think Milton’s the finest sonnets of the old days of poetry, and Wordsworth’s
of the present.’15 Even Francis Jeffrey, usually so hostile to Wordsworth, was
forced to admit Wordsworth’s skill with the sonnet form:€‘All English writers
of sonnets have imitated Milton’, he wrote, ‘and, in this way, Mr Wordsworth,
when he writes sonnets, escapes again from the trammels of his own unfortu-
nate system; and the consequence is, that his sonnets are as much superior to
the greater part of his other poems, as Milton’s sonnets are superior to his.’16
Wordsworth appears to have taken Jeffrey’s comment on board:€he wrote
over 500 sonnets and several sonnet series (the phrase ‘sonnet sequence’ is
 Poetics 53

not current until later in the nineteenth century), including the Sonnets Dedi-
cated to Liberty (1807), the Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822), The River Duddon:€A
Series of Sonnets (1820) and Sonnets upon the Punishment of Death (1841).
This focus on the sonnet may at first seem incongruous with Wordsworth’s
commitment to the ‘real language of men’, the form a very stylized one that
even the poet initially considered ‘egregiously absurd’.17 Yet Wordsworth even-
tually favoured the sonnet because of its potential as a closed space in which
an intense �emotional experience can be compacted, halted and then reflected
on, granting the form a sense of unity other genres could not offer. By turning
the sonnet into a snapshot of feeling, Wordsworth de-sentimentalized a form
previously associated with sensibility by poets such as William Lisle Bowles,
Charlotte Smith and Anna Seward. In ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge,
September 3, 1803’ (1807), for example, Wordsworth overlooks London not to
effuse or gush about the city, but to transform it into a body of calm vitalized
by a gently beating ‘mighty heart’ (14):
Earth has not anything to shew more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendor valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

The brevity of the poem’s length and expression allows Wordsworth to use
the sonnet as a way to summarize or condense moments of heightened con-
sciousness, ‘miniaturing’ the world, as Coleridge put it ‘in order to manifest the
Truth’.18 For Wordsworth, the sonnet form was like a fragile but harmonious
piece of architecture, comprising an ‘orbicular body,€ – a sphere€ – or a dew-
drop’.19
The poet was intrigued by the idea of the sonnet as a perfectly formed
space in which readers might feel calm and meditative. In his sonnet ‘Nuns
fret not at their convent’s narrow room’, Wordsworth suggests that the form
functions like the spare and limited quarters in which nuns and hermits live.
While their restricted environment is conducive to religious thoughts and
54 The Cambridge Introduction to William Wordsworth

prayer, the sonnet similarly focuses readers so that they too can enter into a
state of deep contemplation and vision. The sonnet’s unobtrusive structure
also stops readers from turning their thoughts inward into excessive self-
reflexivity. As a reviewer for the literary magazine, The Athenaeum, argued,
the sonnet is ‘well suited for pure thoughts and delicate fancies; but too calm,
too restrained in its structure and progress, to afford a possible vehicle for
the bursts, starts, throes, and outpourings of magnificent madness’.20 The first
fourteen lines of Wordsworth’s sonnet, ‘Old Man Travelling’, for example,
are structured like a blank-verse sonnet, moving from a description of the
man’s character and movement into a reflection on his apparent grace and
patience. But when the reader discovers the man is going to visit his son in
hospital, a victim of the violence of war, the poem breaks out of the sonnet
form into a faltering and unsteady blank verse metre in order to capture the
anxiety and sorrow inherent to the scene.
Wordsworth did not regard the sonnet as a passive or easily manipulated
form, however, claiming for it a status as a literary and political facilitator. In
‘Scorn not the Sonnet’, for example, he suggests that the form granted WilliamÂ�
Shakespeare the ‘Key’ that ‘unlocked his heart’ (2–3) and enabled him to
write, and gave the poets Petrarch and Tasso the ‘small Lute’ (4) and ‘Pipe’
(5) through which to voice their court music. At the same time, the sonnet
is the stage on which Milton sounds his political ‘Trumpet’ (13), an image
that renders the sonnet an explosive and even apocalyptic form. Wordsworth’s
Milton is one who can blow ‘Soul-animating strains’ (14) into the world like
the angels in Revelation 8.2, so articulating a strong political commitment to
liberty. Wordsworth also invokes Milton as the protector of this liberty and
the saviour of England in the sonnet ‘London, 1802’, his poetic voice, ‘whose
sound was like the sea; / Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free’, able to
guide the nation back to currently lost ‘manners, virtue, freedom, power’
(10–11, 8).
Wordsworth’s construction of Milton as a Christ-like redeemer in his son-
nets is also suggestive of the religious meaning the form held for him. His
most obviously theological poems are the Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822), which
inspired both Felicia Hemans’ well-known sonnet series, ‘Female Characters
of Scripture’ (1834) and also numerous sonnet collections issued by the Oxford
Movement. Wordsworth’s non-religious sonnets also enthused other writers,
especially his ‘tour sonnets’ describing various trips he had ventured upon. His
Yarrow Revisited (published in 1835), ‘Poems Composed or Suggested during
a Tour, in the Summer of 1833’ and ‘Memorials of a Tour in Italy, 1837’ influ-
enced John Bowring’s ‘Sonnets Written during a Late Tour in Italy’, Aubrey de
Vere’s ‘Atlantic Coast Scenery’ and Catherine Godwin’s ‘Four Sonnets Written
during a Summer Tour on the Continent’. The poet Charles Wyatt even wrote
 Poetics 55

a sonnet addressed to a lady ‘With a Volume of Wordsworth’s Sonnets’ (1837),

confirming Wordsworth’s place in what literary journals of the period soon
called ‘sonnettomania’.
It is unlikely, however, that Wyatt envisioned his lady reader with a copy of
Wordsworth’s 1841 series, Sonnets upon the Punishment of Death (1841). These
odd sonnets present a case in support of the death penalty by arguing that the
mere imprisonment of convicts only dehumanizes them by damning them to a
life of sorrow or further crime. The sonnet form offered Wordsworth an ideal
space for such disciplined thoughts. While a poetic defence of capital punish-
ment might jar with Wordsworth’s more gentle and meditative verse, one might
argue that the deliberate choice of a form associated with wavering lovers and
contradictory responses betrays the poet’s awareness of the inconsistencies
inherent to his polemic. His suggestion in sonnet IV, for example, that the abo-
lition of the death penalty elevates death as ‘the thing that ought / To be most
dreaded’ (5–6), is immediately countered in sonnet VIII, where state power
is presented as more terrifying. On the other hand, Wordsworth’s support for
the death penalty in these sonnets might once more be traced to his devotion
to Milton, who suggests in Paradise Lost that Adam and Eve are given a death
sentence by God as a ‘remedy’ to their transgressions, releasing them from sin
(Paradise Lost, XI.162).

Odes, elegies, epitaphs

Like all of Wordsworth’s sonnets, his Sonnets upon the Punishment of Death
invoke reflection on solemn themes. The idea of death obsessed Wordsworth,
and his odes, elegies and epitaphs reveal different aspects of this fascination,
portraying death as a refuge from life and the dead as intrinsic to living com-
munities. Wordsworth claimed that his interest in death was rooted in his
childhood, wherein he would brood over the relationship between the mate�rial
and immaterial, life and death:

Nothing was more difficult for me in my childhood than to admit the

notion of death as a state applicable to my own being … I was often
unable to think of external things as having external existence & I
communed with all that I saw as something not apart from but inherent
in my own immaterial nature. Many times while going to school have I
grasped at a wall or tree to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to
the reality.21

For Wordsworth, childhood permits an idealized vision of life that is grad-

ually eroded by experience, the once ‘dream-like vividness and splendour’
56 The Cambridge Introduction to William Wordsworth

of the world necessarily fading as we encounter bereavement, sorrow and

injustice. Wordsworth used the elegy and ode to work through this shift from
a state of credulity to disenchantment, both forms sharing a tone and style
many �eigh�teenth-century and Romantic poets considered appropriate for the
�expression of a visionary and imaginative poetics.
The elegy and ode also lend themselves to reflection on how we under-
stand and relate to the passage of time, an uneasy subject that both forms
help us to think about in their capacity to explore questions of eternity and
transcenÂ�dence. For Wordsworth both forms administer ‘the comforts’ of reli-
gion, while breathing the ‘spirit of religion’ into us, so granting access to ques-
tions of the unknown and infinite (PW, III.64). Poetry, more than any other
genre, Wordsworth argued, was able to give expression to that religious ‘wish
of the human heart to supply in another state of existence the deficiencies of
this’.22 In other words, if life necessarily consists of a series of losses for Words-
worth€ – of innocence, faith, people, vision€ – the ode and the elegy offered
him space to deal with his consequent bereaved feelings. In fact Wordsworth’s
preoccupation with grief and loss in his poetry renders nearly all of it poten-
tially elegiac. The early deaths of his mother and father certainly haunt Words-
worth’s poetry, as his narrators search for substitute guardians in nature and
the divine. In doing so, Wordsworth strives to transform feelings of despair
and sadness into joy by creating the conditions in which individuals might
become conscious of and then accept their emotional state, and in doing so
make peace with it.
The ode helps us make peace with upsetting experiences because of its
consolatory content:€ ceremonial and panegyric (when written for public
occasions); and meditative and philosophical (when composed for private
reflection). English poetry tends to employ two specific kinds of ode:€the Pin-
daric (characterized by two long, metrically identical stanzas€– the strophe and
antistrophe€– followed by a shorter epode or ‘turn’ in a different metre); and the
Horatian (a longer form with regular repeating stanzas). Romanticism created
its own fragmented and vulnerable kind of ode called the effusion:€ Words-
worth’s attempts include his ‘Effusion in the Pleasure-Ground on the Banks of
the Bran, near Dunkeld’ (1814); and ‘Extempore Effusion upon the Death of
James Hogg’ (1835).
Even Wordsworth’s renowned ‘Intimations Ode’ (published in 1807) plays
with the form’s conventions, partly because it was written as a defence against
critics like Coleridge who believed he had lost his poetic potential to experi-
ment and innovate. The ode consequently maps Wordsworth’s struggle with
his own mortality and his realization that the once innocent and childlike per-
spective through which he viewed the world as an earthly heaven, ‘Â�Apparelled
 Poetics 57

in celestial light’ (4), is fragile and transitory. The most recognized trope in
the ‘Intimations Ode’ is Wordsworth’s fading ‘visionary gleam’ (56), an image
in which he admits that his poetic light has seemingly begun to dim. As
Â�Wordsworth is plunged into a reflection on the loss of this ‘gleam’, the narra-
tive voice shifts from the first to the second person to invite readers to think
about their own ‘shadowy recollections’ (152) of grief and loss. Seen through
these shadows, even nature€– a field, a tree, a single flower€– begins to feel like a
‘prison-house’ (67), its ‘glory’ (18) stripped away as it locks human experience
into a process of organic decline.
With this decline, however, comes an acknowledgement that loss and suf-
fering are as much part of the experience of life as joy and wonder, granting
a kind of wholeness to subjectivity that allows for a new faith to emerge, one
rooted in those feelings engendered by self-reflection and self-awareness. The
ability to have these feelings thus allows the individual to think in such a way
that goes beyond feeling. This is why the little flower that symbolizes atrophy
and grief in line 54 is, by the end of the poem, able to ‘give / Thoughts that do
often lie too deep for tears’ (205–6).
If the ‘Intimations Ode’ helped Wordsworth to redress his fears of death and
transience through bringing together emotional insight with reflection, then
his elegies offered a space to mourn specific deaths and become reconciled
with intense feelings of loss and confusion. Elegy, a form in which the narr�
ator mourns a death or other loss, is a discursive or meditative reflection that
addresses pastoral, mortuary and funereal themes. Pastoral elegy emerged from
a renewed interest in classical literature, and Bion’s Death of Adonis, Â�Virgil’s
Eclogues and Moschus’ Lament for Bion (parts of which Wordsworth trans-
lated into English in 1788), provided elegiac templates for poets like �Milton
and Spenser, who found their references to shepherds and flocks assimilable
with a Christian poetics. Mortuary elegy was more directly religious, but was
marked by an obsessive fascination with graveyards, corpses, spectres, worms
and owls. This kind of elegy was commonly used by graveyard poets such as
Robert Blair, Edward Young and Thomas Gray, who each explored the ten-
sion between the horror of death and damnation and the consolation of divine
redemption.
Related to the mortuary elegy was the funeral elegy, which served as both
a public form (functioning as a visual broadside and displaying woodcuts of
bones, skulls and hourglasses); and also as a private form (as a poem written
by the individual mourner and thrown into the grave during the burial of the
dead). One of the last known instances of this latter tradition occurred during
the funeral of the Master of St John’s, Cambridge in 1787, and was witnessed
by Wordsworth who had just begun his degree there. Invited to write an elegy
58 The Cambridge Introduction to William Wordsworth

for the Master as a way of promoting his commitment to a poetic career, how-
ever, Wordsworth refused, claiming to have no personal intimacy with the
deceased. He had written other elegiac poems, such as ‘The Dog€– An Idyllium’
(1786), because he had felt genuinely close to the deceased animal; he was not
prepared to undermine the form by addressing it to a man he did not know.
The domestic and shared experience of mourning, between a man and a
dog, within communities, families and in the interaction between humans
and nature, is central to Wordsworth’s elegies, whether they are addressed to
semi-fictionalized figures like ‘Matthew’ (which the poet sometimes spelled
‘Mathew’) and ‘Lucy’, or to real people, like his brother John and his daugh-
ter Catherine. In ‘Elegy Written in the Same Place upon the Same Occa-
sion’ (1799), for example, Wordsworth mourns Matthew (assumed by critics
to represent the Hawkshead headmaster, William Taylor), in a familiar and
intimate manner, rejecting the artifice of elegiac convention. The narrator
refuses to sob uncontrollably at Matthew’s death, intimating instead:€ ‘I feel
more sorrow in a smile / Than in a waggon load of tears’ (3–4). Similarly,
Wordsworth domesticates the pastoral convention of introducing the grief of
classical or biblical figures that mourn alongside the narrator. Where Milton
summons Triton, Camus and St Peter to mourn his friend Edward King in
Lycidas (1638), Wordsworth turns to ordinary villagers€– ‘ruddy damsels’ (25),
‘Mothers’ (37), ‘Staid men’ (33), ‘Old Women’ (41) and ‘sheep-curs’ (49)€– to
elegize Matthew.
The communal and shared aspect of mourning characterizes many of
Wordsworth’s elegies, including those he wrote for John in 1805–6 (‘To the
Daisy (Sweet Flower!)’, ‘Distressful Gift! This Book Receives’, ‘When, to the
Attractions of the Busy World’, ‘Elegiac Verses in Memory of My Brother, John
Wordsworth’ and ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle’).
In ‘Elegiac Verses’, for example, written just a few months after John’s death,
Wordsworth invokes ‘me and mine’ (19) as his fellow mourners, the commu-
nality of the family’s grief enabling a collective consolation that protects him
from the emotional paralysis of private mourning. In ‘Elegiac Stanzas Sug-
gested by a Picture of Peele Castle’ (1806), however, written a year after John’s
death, Wordsworth is able to look back and note how, even though he was
temporarily disabled by his grief, he has reflected enough on these feelings to
turn them into joyful remembrance. John’s death thus becomes a ‘deep distress’
that ‘hath humanized my Soul’ (36). Dorothy similarly reflected on and recol-
lected her grief to come to terms with John’s death:
I see nothing that he would not have loved with me and enjoyed had
he been by my side; and indeed, my consolations rather come to me in
gusts of feeling, than are the quiet growth of my Mind. I know it will
 Poetics 59

not always be so€– the time will come when the light of the setting Sun
upon these mountain tops will be as heretofore a pure joy€– not the
same gladness, that can never be€– but yet a joy even more tender. It will
soothe me to know how happy he would have been could he have seen
the same beautiful spectacle.23
The elegiac tone of Dorothy’s letter, like that of Wordsworth’s elegies, moves us
because it invites us into an experience of already shared, and so transfigured
grief that allows us to reflect on our own loss.
The elegy is an interpersonal and reciprocal form for Wordsworth, present-
ing strong emotions about the dead to elicit continued feeling in the living
reader. He argued in Essays upon Epitaphs (1810) that the epitaph, a poem
written for inscription on a grave, performed a similar function, preserv-
ing memories of the dead by providing a focal point for the living to mourn.
‘Hence the parish-church in the stillness of the country’, Wordsworth stated,
‘is a visible centre of a community of the living and the dead’, housing the
tombstones on which epitaphs are inscribed and offering a physical space for
the collective expression of grief (PW, II.56). It is the graveyard, and not the
church that Wordsworth centralizes here, an open space in which ‘the sor-
rowing hearts of the survivors’ can find release by acknowledging that their
specific thoughts about particular deceased individuals echo those of other
mourners, and so are joined with them ‘into one harmony by the general sym-
pathy’ (PW, II.53, 57).
Wordsworth liked epitaphs because they are concrete, material and written
in a ‘general language of humanity’, always functioning as ‘true’ because they
are ‘hallowed by love€– the joint offspring of the worth of the dead and the
affections of the living!’ (PW, II.57, 58). As Wordsworth argues, the graveyard
visitor, seeing only inscriptions of ‘faithful Wives, tender Husbands, dutiful
Children, and good Men of all classes’, might well ask, ‘â•›“Where are all the bad
people buried?”â•›’ (PW, II.63) or dismiss the epitaphs he or she reads as senti-
mental and poorly written. Yet for Wordsworth, the aesthetic of the epitaph
should enable good feeling in the present, not to erase the faults or problems
of the past, but so that the onlooker might feel ‘tranquillised’ and emotionally
connect with fellow mourners. ‘An epitaph is not a proud writing shut up for
the studious’, he claimed, but ‘is exposed to all’, the ‘stooping old man’, ‘the
child’, ‘the stranger’, ‘the friend’:€‘it is concerning all, and for all’ (PW, II.59).
While Wordsworth wrote many epitaphs of his own, copied out assiduously
by Dorothy to reinforce their communal aspect, his favourite epitaph consisted
of only a name and two dates, its anonymity universalizing its appeal:
In an obscure corner of a Country Church-yard I once [es]pied, half-
overgrown with Hemlock and Nettles, a very small Stone laid upon
60 The Cambridge Introduction to William Wordsworth

the ground, bearing nothing more than the name of the Deceased
with the date of birth and death, importing that it was an Infant which
had been born one day and died the following. I know not how far
the Reader may be in sympathy with me, but more awful thoughts of
rights conferred, of hopes awakened, of remembrances stealing away or
vanishing were imparted to my mind by that Inscription there before
my eyes than by any other that it has ever been my lot to meet with
upon a Tomb-Stone. â•… (PW, II.93)

The inscription, two dates, is a paradigmatic form of poetry for Wordsworth,

its meanings sustained not by interpretive skill but through the non-linguistic
context in which it is read. The particularly of this inscription on this grave in
this churchyard in this community grants the numbers of these dates a mean-
ing beyond intellectual inquiry, one that is instead sustained by the shared
experiences and affections of those who stand before it. If we attempt to aes-
theticize or analyse these bereaved or sorrowful feelings without emotionally
entering them, Wordsworth suggests, we abstract our words into that counter-
spirit with which we began the chapter, shutting individuals away inside a lin-
guistic rather than lived world.

Silent poetry

For Wordsworth, then, successful poetry enables human feeling rather than
cerebral critical commentary. In his own poetry he sought to shape readers
through a gentle sensibility that made them into poets too, liberating them to
fine-tune their feelings so that they could offer compassion to others. For him,
the poet is:
the rock of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver,
carrying every where with him relationship and love. In spite of
difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and
customs, in spite of things silently gone out of mind and things violently
destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast
empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all
time. The objects of the Poet’s thoughts are every where. â•… (PW, I.141)
The poet’s objective is to humanize the world by drawing out its emotional
aspect, reminding readers that what makes us unique is our shared capacity
for feeling. John, for example, was a clumsy communicator, wrote no verse,
and struggled to articulate his feelings in both public and private form. A let-
ter to Mary, for example, in which he responds to her offer of a home where
 Poetics 61

he would always be welcome after her marriage to his brother, is suggestive of

John’s capacity for a strong feeling he is impotent to express:
I have been reading your Letter over & over again My dearest Mary till
tears have come into my eyes & I known [sic] not how to express my[s]
elf thou ar’t [a] kind & dear creature. But wh<t>at ever fate Befal me
I shall love to the last and bear thy<y> memory with me to the grave
Thine affly John Wordsworth.24
This, his last surviving letter to his future sister-in-law, is indicative of those
qualities in him Wordsworth most admired:€patience, kindness, affection and,
most of all, a love of poetry (the last two lines of John’s letter include a reference
to Wordsworth’s poem ‘Michael’). While John’s attempts at communication are
awkward, the depth of feeling expressed is genuine and full of meaning:€there
is nothing poetic in terms of sound or metre, but as an overflow of feeling the
letter is model verse.
Wordsworth consequently called John a ‘silent poet’, inscribing the title on
his grave at St Oswald’s in Grasmere to encapsulate his admiration for John’s
sensitivity to nature and to those around him. For Wordsworth, the �emotional
activity that precedes composition of written poems is more valuable than the
finished text (and we should remember that there are few poems in Words-
worth’s collected works that he himself considered complete, consumed as he
was in constant revisions of his poetry). Wordsworth’s most affective poetic
figures€ – the old man travelling, the old Cumberland beggar, Martha Ray,
Goody Blake, Michael, the idiot boy, the leech gatherer, Emily Norton€– are all
silent poets who live between the felt experiences of life and their expression
in words. These borderline people represent an insight and affective state that,
because it cannot be verbalized, is disregarded by a ‘talking world’ that valÂ�
ues intellectual, not emotional accomplishments (P, XII.172). The silent poet
is coextensive with that valued most by Wordsworth, however, embodying,
like John, compassion, receptivity and awareness. ‘I can say nothing higher
of my ever dear Brother’, Wordsworth wrote to Beaumont, ‘than that he was
worthy of his Sister who is now weeping beside me, and of the friendship
of �Coleridge:€meek, affectionate, silently enthusiastic, loving all quiet things,
and a Poet in every thing but words.’25
In ‘When First I Journeyed Hither’ (1800), Wordsworth even addresses his
brother John as:
A silent Poet! from the solitude
Of the vast Sea didst bring a watchful heart
Still couchant, an inevitable ear
And an eye practised like a blind man’s touch.â•… (88–91)
62 The Cambridge Introduction to William Wordsworth

If words are a counter-spirit to the expression of emotions, granting them a

voice but then threatening to dissolve their experiential aspect by doing so, then
the silent poet makes such feelings material, animated and incarnate without
distorting them. He is like the gravestone on which the epitaph is inscribed,
sustaining and manifesting emotion in a non-linguistic form. Wordsworth,
by contrast, depended on language to evoke his experience of life’s emotional
content, but the poems that he wrote invariably ‘derange’, ‘subvert’, ‘lay waste’,
‘vitiate’ and ‘dissolve’ these experiences in curious and unfamiliar ways (PW,
II.85). His constant revisions to these poems also exemplify his commitment
to poetry as a fluid and changing form that confounds the reader intent on
fixing the meaning of his work or discovering the ‘standard’ text. The next
chapter explores Wordsworth’s poetry by offering some suggestive readings to
facilitate, rather than influence, your own interpretations of the varying and
shifting meanings they comprise.